Jeff Gundy's Without a Plea is both taut and sprawling, brashly ranging from stick-thin lyrics to page-crossing two-line stanzas (his favored formal device), to prose-based explorations of subjects as disparate as mud and gravel, a red shed, and the condition of rural America. Gundy wears his intellect lightly, but he does wear it to contemplate the interwoven realms of religion, history, society, and family: "Everything is connected but not even the wind harp can say exactly how. // To build soil from dust and ashes. // To argue with god and the world as it is. //To notice the groundhog, and let it be." We are in great need, and I expect are going to be in much greater need, of such hard nosed gentleness. --Stephen Corey,